May 1, 2001

PEOPLE'S VOICE SENDS May Day Greetings to workers across Canada and around the world! This May Day comes as Canadians protest in huge numbers against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. The massive April 21 demonstration in Quebec City bodes well for the future of the struggle for democracy, social progress, and socialism.

The corporations are now clearly the targets of the working class and the people's movements. After more than a decade of confusion about the source of the attack on working people's rights and standards, on democracy, sovereignty, and peace, the transnational corporations and their institutions are being singled out. The trend is now for mass struggle to curb their power, and to eventually eliminate it altogether.

These developments were obvious at the People's Summit and on the streets of Quebec City, where the breadth of resistance and the level of consensus and unity reached new highs in the anti-globalization movement, and where anti-communist attitudes were virtually non-existent compared to the strong support for the people of socialist Cuba.

The events in Quebec also showed that support for the reformist strategy of seeking "side deals" on labour and the environment is weakening. Most delegates at the People's Summit, for example, opposed the FTAA in totality, regardless of such window dressing. For the same reasons, the sham "democracy" clause in the official summit's final declaration must be sharply challenged. The FTAA and its imperialist authors are the most vicious enemies of democracy, including the unelected "president" in Washington.

The broad sense of social solidarity, which has brought so many different peoples and organizations together, has at its core the power of the labour movement. More than any other sector, organized workers have a profound interest in uniting the broadest sections of Canadian society into motion against the unbridled rule of capital in Canada and in the Americas.

This May Day, labour must build on the victories in Quebec City, knitting the ties that bind the people's forces together for the major struggles ahead. The ongoing battle to stop the FTAA will require even stronger united actions. So will the fights to save Medicare and public education, to block the privatization and deregulation of social programs and services, and to halt the attacks on labour and democratic rights.

Labour also has an enormous responsibility to support a people's agenda to undo the damage of decades of neo-liberal governments, and to move Canada in a direction that will put real curbs on monopoly power and open the door to fundamental and progressive change.

Labour must not allow differences within the trade union movement to get in the way of its historic job of defending the interests of workers in the workplace and in society as a whole. This is no jurisdictional battle. This is the battle for the future of Canada, for the future of the labour movement, and for the future of our children, and their children.

Unity in struggle! This must be the benchmark against which our actions are measured, the gauge marking the advances of the powerful movement of Canadian resistance which has come of age in Quebec in this new century.

On a wider scale, the labour movement of the entire western hemisphere must now find the ways to build resistance on a much larger scale. It remains important to battle corporations and right-wing governments issue by issue, but the struggle against the FTAA is now front and centre. At the People's Summit, Quebec labour activist Pierre Fontaine got strong applause when he called for mass general strikes against the FTAA across the hemisphere on May Day 2002. That's the kind of bold strategy workers need to unite around today.

For now, we have much work to do, as well as much to celebrate on May 1, 2001!

© 2001 Communist Party of Canada